scripts.mit.edu

How do I redirect visitors from my web.mit.edu or www.mit.edu URL to my scripts.mit.edu website?

URLs on web.mit.edu (e.g., http://web.mit.edu/jbarnold/ or http://web.mit.edu/~jbarnold/, the tilde is optional) point to the top level of your Athena locker (/mit/jbarnold in this case).

URLs on www.mit.edu (e.g., http://www.mit.edu/~jbarnold/, the tilde is required) point to the www subdirectory of your Athena locker (/mit/jbarnold/www).

If you want visitors to your web.mit.edu or www.mit.edu URL to see your scripts site instead, first, cd to the directory corresponding to your web.mit.edu or www.mit.edu URL (for example, my directory /mit/jbarnold/www corresponds to the URL http://www.mit.edu/~jbarnold):

athena% attach jbarnold
athena% cd /mit/jbarnold/www

Next, create a .htaccess.mit file in this directory and add rewrite rules to it. For example, if I wanted to redirect both http://www.mit.edu/~jbarnold/ and http://web.mit.edu/jbarnold/www to https://jbarnold.scripts.mit.edu, I would add the following two lines:

Redirect 301 /~jbarnold https://jbarnold.scripts.mit.edu
Redirect 301 /jbarnold/www https://jbarnold.scripts.mit.edu

The first line handles redirecting http://www.mit.edu/~jbarnold to https://jbarnold.scripts.mit.edu and the second line (which is completely independent) handles redirecting http://web.mit.edu/~jbarnold to https://jbarnold.scripts.mit.edu.

Finally, if you placed this in your locker, rather in the www subdirectory, you may need to give the web.mit.edu server access to your locker, so it can read your .htaccess.mit file (warning: this will also cause all the files in your locker to be readable over web.mit.edu):

athena% fs sa . system:htaccess.mit read

You should check that the redirect is working, and that people cannot read your personal files via web.mit.edu (e.g., http://web.mit.edu/jbarnold/).

You can find more information about .htaccess files and Apache Redirect rules via Google. IS&T has a website about .htaccess.mit files, but it focuses on restricting content, not redirects. If you have questions about how you should set up your .htaccess.mit file, feel free to contact us by e-mailing scripts@mit.edu.

You can also redirect visitors from your scripts.mit.edu site to another website.